Christmas means Christmas carols; a marvellous invention. Like many others I am prejudiced in their favour as I have been singing some of them for as long as I can remember.
My favourite is still “Silent Night” with its wonderful message and melody, accessible to young and old.
The words come from an 1816 German poem by the young Austrian priest Father Joseph Mohr. He was assistant priest in the village of Mariapfarr, high in the Alps near Salzburg and his parish priest used to worry about him, because he was very social and loved to make jokes, drink and even sing dubious songs!
The whole country and his village, which was regularly isolated by snow during the long winters, had been through a bad period of military occupation by French and Bavarian soldiers. The French Emperor Napoleon had only been defeated a year earlier at Waterloo by the English and German troops under the Duke of Wellington and Marshal Blucher and “Silent Night” was celebrating the new peace; the heavenly calm of that holy night when the Christ child was born.
Mohr himself had a difficult upbringing because he was born illegitimate in Salzburg, never knowing his soldier father who had moved on before he was born. Blessed with a fine voice Mohr sang in the choir of St. Peter’s Church under the direction of Michael Haydn, brother of the great composer Franz Joseph Haydn. He was ordained a priest after receiving the papal dispensation then required for illegitimates.
By the Christmas season of 1818 Father Mohr was in the neighbouring village of Oberndorf and it was only on Christmas Eve that he asked his close friend the village organist Franz Gruber to compose a tune for his peace poem.
Mohr desperately wanted a new carol for Midnight Mass and some versions about the birth of the music tell of Gruber struggling vainly through the hours of the night until finally inspiration came to him.
By a happy chance the Church organ had been damaged by floods, so the hymn was arranged for two voices and a choir in four part harmony accompanied by guitar. The use of such a folk instrument was highly unusual then.
As Mary was scarcely mentioned Protestants happily sang the hymn.
The Trapp Family singers came to use it to conclude all their Christmas concerts.
Before Victoria was Queen of England, “Silent Night” was being sung in North America and at a special birthday recital for the young Princess Victoria.
Gruber died as a well known composer while Father Mohr continued as a country priest, dying without sufficient assets to pay for his funeral.
By World War One “Silent Night” was known everywhere and on Christmas Eve 1914 British and German troops, in a short unofficial truce, joined together in no-mans-land to sing “Silent Night”, an anthem of universal brotherhood.
May we still heed its message.
